this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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We definitely shouldn't let corporations to use carbon capture to greenwash themselves but doesn't mean we should stop any research in carbon capture.
The problem is we set a target of "net zero" by <in 2 decades>. So naturally companies will do it the cheapest way that requires the least changes to their business.
We don't need "net zero" we need "as closest to total zero as possible".
If the carbon is properly sequestered after capture, and the energy use is accounted for in emissions, wouldn't net zero be just as good as zero? It's almost always going to be way more expensive to take the carbon back out of the atmosphere than to not emit it in the first place, so I'd think you'd get mostly the same effect.
That if is the biggest issue. These carbon calculations require a lot of math and assumptions and uncertainty to work. In the global economy with many steps along the path from source to sink, every actor has an incentive to make things look better than they actually are. So research on the topic has found a wide variety of issues with carbon offsets and other strategies that aren’t direct reductions of in emissions. So it’s pretty likely that net zero would not actually be net zero. Reducing emissions directly is much easier to verify.
Also, millions die from air pollution every year and net zero doesn’t do anything about that.